At the new books shelves of my friendly local public library
I recently found the 2024 book by Robin Reames titled The Ancient Art of
Thinking for Yourself: The power of rhetoric in polarized times. I have been
skimming through it. Titles for five of her six chapters include classical
names. They are followed by a Conclusion chapter and a detailed educational one
on How to Think Rhetorically. In my previous post on June 8, 2024, I blogged
about how The Pentad from Kenneth Burke is a rhetorical tool for sorting out
stories people tell.
Her Chapter 4 is titled Deep Ideology: What’s Buried in
Alcibiades’s Words. Starting with a paragraph at the bottom of page 139 she
says:
“The fact that we don’t much use formal logical methods when
we make arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re being illogical. It just
means that our arguments don’t come in strictly logical packaging. Quite often
they come in quasi-logical packaging. There is often a hidden
quasi-logical structure to the arguments that people make every day, or so the
twentieth-century logician Stephen Toulmin, an important figure in the New
Rhetoric movement, believed. The Uses of Argument by Toulmin was one of
several books published in 1958 by New Rhetoric thinkers like Hannah Arendt,
Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. In that postwar era,
these thinkers were determined to redouble their efforts in recovering reasoned
debate, speech, persuasion, and argumentation. Toulmin developed his model of
argumentation, now known as the Toulmin scheme, to expose the common underlying
structure of everyday arguments.
In many ways, Toulmin was simply trying to bring the study
of logic back to its Aristotelian roots, since Aristotle himself aimed to
provide a method that could expose how actual reasoning occurs. Like Aristotle
in postwar Athens and other luminaries of the New Rhetoric in postwar Europe
and America, Toulmin didn’t want logic to be a merely academic activity, cut
off from the real work of human argumentation and understanding. Instead, he
wanted to show how people make actual arguments in everyday discourse, and how
understanding this might raise the bar of rational discussion. In everyday
arguments, people respond to perceived problems and make claims about what
ought to happen, guided by a sense of what is possible. They defend their
claims against challengers, both real and hypothetical.”
There is an article at Purdue University’s Purdue Online
Writing Lab [OWL] titled Toulmin Argument which succinctly explains:
“Developed by philosopher Stephen E. Toulmin, the Toulmin
method is a style of argumentation that breaks arguments down into six
component parts: claim, grounds, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing. In
Toulmin’s method, every argument begins with three fundamental parts: the
claim, the grounds, and the warrant.
A claim is the assertion that authors would like to prove to
their audience. It is, in other words, the main argument.
The grounds [data] of an argument are the evidence and facts
that help support the claim.
Finally, the warrant, which is either implied or stated
explicitly, is the assumption that links the grounds to the claim. ….
Backing refers to any additional support of the warrant. In
many cases, the warrant is implied, and therefore the backing provides support
for the warrant by giving a specific example that justifies the warrant.
The qualifier shows that a claim may not be true in all
circumstances. Words like ‘presumably,’ ‘some,’ and ‘many’ help your audience
understand that you know there are instances where your claim may not be
correct.
The rebuttal is an acknowledgement of another valid view of
the situation.”
In her educational chapter on How to Think Rhetorically Robin
has a section starting on page 245 titled Let’s Think Rhetorically: The Toulmin
Scheme. A simple, graphical Harry Potter example is shown above.
Her discussion starting in the first new paragraph on page
248 says:
“You can think more rhetorically using the Toulmin scheme by
choosing any argument from a public debate that interests you and breaking it
down into Toulmin’s five [sic] components. And you can even use the blank
template on the following page as a guide). The following questions will get
you started. Once you get going, the process can be eye-opening.
Start with the data. Why? It’s typically the easiest to spot
People rarely advance a claim without citing some statistic, fact, figure, or
concrete reality.
Ask yourself, What claim is this data supporting?
Identify the backing. What basic rule, law, principle, or
precept is the warrant based on? You can sometimes get at the backing by asking
what field that type of argument would be found in (law, science,
aesthetics, etc.).
Look for qualifiers and rebuttals. Or imagine what kinds of
qualifiers and rebuttals would be appropriate, given the relationship between
the backing and the claim. If a person makes an unqualified argument, or
if he can see no case where his argument does not apply, then this can show us why
it feels as though there is no room for discussion.”
There is a very detailed 2024 CSU Writing Guide by Laurel
Nesbit titled Using the Toulmin Method which you can download as a thirty-page
pdf.
